Congratulations to Luca La Colla, MD, MSHI, who recently completed his studies to earn a Master of Science in Health Informatics (MSHI) from the University of Pittsburgh.
Dr. La Colla’s degree work focused on data science, which provides tools to analyze, extract, and present data to the health care community to help health care organizations make well-informed, data-driven decisions. Through the use of databases, machine learning, and clinical prediction models, data scientists aim to identify areas of potential improvement in patient care to decrease patient morbidity, decrease costs to the health system, and ultimately improve patient outcomes.
Dr. La Colla completed the degree program through our Faculty Fellow Advanced Scholarship Training (FFAST) Career Development Program. FFAST provides financial support for faculty members in our department to pursue advanced degrees in health fields outside anesthesiology to launch subspecialty teams.
“I was extremely grateful to participate in FFAST and to our Chair Dr. Aman Mahajan for making this program available to us,” says Dr. La Colla. “This a unique opportunity that most other institutions do not offer and I am looking forward to working on analytics, information systems, and clinical research. The role of informatics and data science in anesthesia is still under exploration as this is a relatively new discipline, which makes this an exciting time for the subspecialty."
Faculty in our department with the desire to continue their education and pursue graduate-level certifications and/or degrees in areas like informatics, business, leadership, clinical research, and other fields, are encouraged to consider taking advantage of our FFAST program.